Register Puzzles Solve Teams Statistics Rules Guide FAQ Archive

CISRA Puzzle Competition 2011 - Solutions

2B. Look Both Ways

The puzzle presents us with sixteen clues, and sixteen words below. We can already note some minor points: There are the same number of words and clues, suggesting a pairing may arise; the words are given in alphabetical order, so that their order is probably irrelevant; the clues are not arranged in any obvious way, so their order probably is significant.

Some of the clues have many possible answers, but there's a few which are sufficiently clear. A quick pass through could produce the answers "Virtual Fashion", "Left Right", "Doctor Strange", "Once Around", "Samus Aran" and possibly others. This should be enough to notice a pattern: The answer to each clue is a two-word phrase where the first word is in the list. This allows the rest of the list to be filled in with almost all ambiguity resolved. In order, we get:

"Electrical Ground" might perhaps be "Electrical Earth", but the use of "earth" in the clue discourages this. "Kettle Hole" could be "Kettle Lake", but the term "cavity" is more suggestive of the former.

There's possible connections to be found between the items, but there are two that lead to the next step. The initial letters of these phrases spell out "Voldemort Kershaw"; this is two names, in keeping with the pattern so far, but what could link them? A little searching (sadly hampered by some spurious matches) turns up singer Nik Kershaw, who had a number one hit in the mid-eighties with The Riddle... and "Riddle" is the real surname of Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter book and film series.

The second, and quicker, method of reaching this conclusion is to search for the second words in the answer phrases. Either way, the process leads to the lyrics of The Riddle, the chorus of which is:

Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground
Where an old man of Aran goes around and around
And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night
For a strange kind of fashion there's a wrong and a right

So each of the answer words appears as a stressed part of the chorus. This also serves to resolve any ambiguities in the answers.

The insight required at this point is that we should reorder the items to match the lyrics. There will be a minor ambiguity due to the two uses of "around", but we can hope that other factors will resolve this.

But should we expect anything useful out of this reordering? The last words of each answer had to be what they are; the first words are constrained by having to form phrases with them, and also by the message that they have already revealed. There's very little leeway for further information in them, and indeed we get no further sense from the answers in this way.

But there's more information associated to each phrase – there's the clues themselves! (The puzzle title can be considered to hint weakly at this.) And come to think of it, a few of those clues are worded quite oddly indeed...

(The second hint also reveals a hidden message to this effect. On its surface, it merely directs towards The Riddle. However, the hint is written to match the rhythm of the song, and taking the words which would be emphasised gives the instruction: "Seek new Riddle use answers to order clues".)

So... if we now write the clues in the order corresponding to the lyrics, we get the following:

  • What yellow ribbons were to be tied around, in song
  • Huge waterway (from Unlimited Magic: The Gathering) with a casting cost of two red mana
  • You might find this kind of cavity left by a receding glacier
  • Direct connection to the earth for draining away excess electricity
  • In-charge officer of first nonstop around-the-world jet flight; former DO of the SAC
  • Deadly Metroid hunter
  • Comedy/Drama with Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, and Laura San Giacomo
  • Action to take to see a human skull, according to They Might Be Giants
  • Replicated, distributed, or collective consciousness
  • Typing software's fictional touch-typist
  • One item of clothing for a bride to cover her face with
  • Other novel by author of Sparkling Cyanide
  • Neurosurgeon turned sorcerer
  • In their own words, the genre of Miss Bimbo
  • Song from same soundtrack and singer as X Gon' Give It to Ya
  • Traditional order of foot movement when marching forward

And we can see that we get a message from the first letters of the clues when written in this order (and this message lets us determine the right order of the two "around" clues). The presence of this message explains some, although not all, of the oddness of the clues. It reads:

WHY DID CARTOONIST

This seems like only a fragment of a message, though. If we make this assumption, where could the rest of the message come from?

At this point sufficiently inspired guesswork might lead to a possible completion of the message and so to the eventual intended answer. The more plausible process, though, is to make the intuitive leap that the puzzle title suggests looking at both ends of the clues, not just the starts. And indeed, we find the second half of the message there (and this explains the remaining oddness of the clues):

WHY DID CARTOONIST
GARY CROSS THE ROAD

It's a riddle! And strongly reminiscent of the classic riddle "Why did the chicken cross the road?" The classic answer is "To get to the other side." But instead of a chicken, we have some cartoonist named Gary – what could this mean?

A little searching, or familiarity with his work, will turn up the cartoonist Gary Larson, best known for his syndicated cartoon The Far Side.

Putting this all together yields the answer to the riddle, which is the answer to the puzzle: TO GET TO THE FAR SIDE.

(Note that the puzzle title is very good advice to follow before attempting to cross a road.)